Anonymous Admits: We Have No Skills

One of the spokespeople behind the Anonymous Twitter account hosted an “ask me anything” session on Reddit yesterday, during which the hacktivist rep talked Mexican cartels, Occupy Wall Street and various #ops around the world. Anonymous captured the public’s imagination and inspired fear with stunts like temporarily taking down the websites of large corporations and taking over Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, at the same time laying claim to high-profile hacks such as the filching of credit card information from Playstation users. But the group isn’t as all-powerful as the FBI seems to fear.

“How do you think hackers within ‘Anonymous’ compare to those hackers employed by governments to carry out strategic hacks?” one Redditor asked. “Anonymous members are so often branded as script kiddies.”

“We don’t think they compare at all,” the Anonymous rep answered. “Usually, most of the times, you will not find any high profile hacking skills within Anonymous. For a reason: It’s not needed. Anonymous, basically, is a very loose bunch of random Internet people. Few of them are hackers.”

There you have it, folks. Anonymous isn’t a group of hackers–their choice of attack is always to flood websites with queries until the target gets overloaded.

“But,” Anonymous continued, “Poke them hard enough and they might show you some wizard stuff (hbgary). But this is done by very few people. The masses just cheer and become inspired. To do better stuff. It’s why we’ll win.”

Betabeat is now the newly launched Innovation section of the Observer. All your favorite features and columns—as well as exciting new areas of tech coverage—can now be found at Observer.com/Innovation.

Don't miss the latest and best writing on technology and the future of business innovation. Add the Innovation section to your RSS feed and follow the Observer on Twitter and Facebook.